The Brains Behind a Winning Show

Michael Hart -- Tradeshow Week, 4/1/2008 11:30:00 AM

Put health care and information technology together and you’d expect to have a winning combination for a tradeshow.

“Everybody wants that,” said Karen Malone, director of meeting services for the Health Information & Management Society, as well as manager of its Tradeshow Week 200 show.

But it’s not just good fortune that keeps the HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition pumping on all cylinders. Malone, an Expo Group Show Manager of the Year Award winner, has a few tricks to keep one of the hottest shows in the industry – let alone the health care show sector – growing year after year.

Malone recently spoke with TSW Editor-in-Chief Michael Hart about what it takes to keep HIMSS as successful as it has been.

Question: What was new at the show this year? Answer: One thing we always hear as a complaint is that the show is getting too big and overwhelming. We’re getting more clinicians, more nurses and doctors, and they just want to find what we’re offering for them.
We decided what we really need is a conference within a conference. In order to do that, on the Web site we created what we call MyHIMSS ’08. You identify yourself by who you are, your audience type. 
For instance, if you’re a doctor, it would identify everything we are offering for you as a physician. Then you’re able to create your own schedule from that. It’s a good marketing tool and a good planning tool.
Our clinician audience went way up this year, and we think that was in large part the reason for it.

Q: Do you know how many people used this? A: We actually have statistics on this new feature. It was 8,000 to 10,000 at least.

Q: What else was new? A: The other new thing wasn’t as radical. We had lots of attendees complaining about all the mailings they get pre-conference. We were renting mailing labels like everybody else, and realized that 400 or 500 of our exhibitors were renting the labels.
They were all sending mailings at the very last hour when the majority of attendees were registered. Attendees were getting very frustrated.
We came up with different options for the exhibitors. One of them was called the Yellow Pages. We created a phone book-like document that we let exhibitors buy ad space in. We put it together and sent it out to all our registered attendees two or three weeks before the conference. It was very effective; it was a good revenue source for us; and a way for exhibitors to market themselves to registered attendees and still minimize the mailings.

Q: Have you exported HIMMS overseas? A: Yes, we just started a little over a year and a half ago. We’ve had two now in Europe. We had our first one in fall ’06 in Geneva, Switzerland, with 1,700 people and 50 exhibitors. The last one we had in fall of ’07 was in Vienna, (Austria,) where we had 1,900 people and about 70 exhibitors. We had the show in Singapore last year, and we had almost 1,200 attendees and 55 exhibitors.

Q: Why did you do it? A: For the last three or four years, we’ve heard from our corporate market, for the most part. We kept hearing we needed to go global. There’s no HIMSS anywhere else in the world, nobody out there representing health care IT. It was based on demand from global customers.

Q: Why has HIMSS grown so steadily over the last few years? A: Health care, a critical issue, only gets more critical. It’s on everybody’s agenda, every political agenda. IT is the enabler that can make health care higher quality and more cost-effective. Everyone wants that.

Q: What, if anything, will make that growth plateau? A: Like any industry, it will happen eventually, even though this will always be a top industry. Health care is relevant to everyone and always will be, but we’ve got a limited universe. There are only so many hospitals out there.
Eventually, they will all have their systems in place but, having said that, technology continues to evolve. It depends on where technology goes.

Q: Is the health care tradeshow sector recession-proof? A: I don’t know that any sector is completely recession-proof. The health care sector is in large part supported by government. There will be some recession impact because of the government reimbursement. We haven’t seen it yet, but that doesn’t mean we won’t. It’s something we need to keep an eye out for.